Einstein postulated that “once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into infinite nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.” But if you consider his genius a tacit endorsement to clash patterns, you may want to reconsider.
Scientists at Columbia University and Cal State Northridge have determined that dressing smarter can also help you think smarter – in a manner of speaking. Their recently published study sought to determine the influence formal clothing holds over both concrete and abstract thinking.
Concrete thinking is the result of a cognitive process concerned with immediacy and the base mechanisms of an action, while abstract thinking is more concerned with the intentions behind that action and as a result is larger and longer term in scope. As the research paper explains, under concrete thinking the action of locking a door could be interpreted as “turning a key,” but abstract thinking would construe the same action as “securing a house.”
Abstract thinking has been proven to benefit from social distance: for example, the formality of titles such as sir or madam have been found to create a social distance in which the mechanisms of abstract thinking have improved. Considering that formal clothing is a variant of social distance in itself, proven to elicit simultaneous notions of respect, power and avoidance, the scientists involved in the study were curious to discover if the act of wearing formal clothes was enough to alter our patterns of thought.
The researchers facilitated this experiment through a series of abstract and concrete tests conducted on participants in clothes that ranged from personable casual wear to more formal attire – the kind one would expect to wear to an interview or business meeting.
The conclusion? While wearing casual clothing breaks down social distance and enhances concrete thinking, formal clothing achieves the opposite: increasing abstract cognition regardless of influencing factors such as intimacy, socioeconomic status and sociometric status.
According to the research, formal clothing made the wearer feel powerful, allowing for greater social distance that in turn enhanced their abstract thought. As the paper elicits:
Having power is having control over resources that others do not. This leads to an asymmetrical social distance; the powerless depend on the powerful (for those resources), whereas the powerful are more independent, and thereby more socially distant.
Impressive as this research is, it is only the latest in a series of scientific studies to quantify the social and psychological benefits of dressing well. A popular theory known as enclothed cognition suggests that how you dress can alter your psychological perceptions and performance, while making a strong first impression through attire can evoke the halo effect, in which people take a single positive attribute – for instance, what you’re wearing – and embellish it in their minds to create a positive perspective of an individual as a whole.
So please, dress smart. You may never reach the intellectual heights of Einstein: but on the plus side, you won’t be wearing stripes with plaid.